Granted, I don’t think unethical people are physically dirtier than ethical ones, so this is not all so literal, but this link between abstract concepts and perception also reminds me of synesthesia, and some wildly interesting current research is worth pointing out.

Ferrine Spector and Daphne Maurer, at McMaster University, conducted experiments that suggests all of us may have some degree of superposition between our senses.

“Significantly more people than chance, for instance, associated the smell of mushrooms with the colours blue or yellow. Lavender elicited the colour green and the texture of sticky liquid, while ginger was perceived as black and sharp.”

Another experiment, by Ursina Teuscher at the University of California, found that many people who didn’t declare themselves synaesthetes managed to produce associations quite consistent with synaesthesia.

These works were mentioned at New Scientist, and suggest more intermingling between our senses and abstract concepts than we commonly assume.

As a filthy debunker, I must also speculate that these largely unexplored unconscious associations between different senses and concepts may have an even more unexplored relevance to psi research. If people consistently share an unnoticed bias, that could affect several experiments attempting to investigate telepathy, for instance. What may look like a very small but consistent anomaly could be product of such bias. Which is not supernatural at all.

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“As a filthy debunker, I must also speculate that these largely unexplored unconscious associations between different senses and concepts may have an even more unexplored relevance to psi research. If people consistently share an unnoticed bias, that could affect several experiments attempting to investigate telepathy, for instance. What may look like a very small but consistent anomaly could be product of such bias. Which is not supernatural at all.”

Speculation is fine, but it doesn’t work so well when experiments are done blind, and with subjects isolated from each other.

MachineElf, but what I suggested is exactly that these unconscious shared bias might play some influence on allegedly blind, isolated, subjects.

For instance, the color of the walls in the lab where two subjects entered might influence them to suggest the same seemingly unrelated impressions, like mushrooms (in the study quoted above, people associated mushroom smells with the colors blue or yellow).

This is not supposed to be a final dismissive explanation for all reported anomalous psi phenomena, but I think this kind of subtle influence must be taken into account, as we now know a bit more on the subject.

Who knows, I speculate that it could produce a statistically relevant “anomaly”.

[…] thought this for a long time. Interesting connection to psi research at the end though. Category: Language, […]

Jace January 6th, 2013
9:26 pm

It’s unhealthy for us to be alone for extended periods of time. We are social animals. That doesn’t mean we should be packed into our living spaces and not have personal space. It means we need human contact of a kind we have consented to by desire (not by situation). So, when you’re lonely, do you maybe feel cold as a biological encouragement to seek the warmth of another human being’s body?